AirWatch currently has both on-premise and cloud offerings for your organization. Making the decision of hosting AirWatch in the cloud or on-premise will be purely determined by your organization's stance on cloud services. There is no difference between the services offered in the cloud or on-premise with AirWatch.

As we have all witnessed over the past few years, there has been a tremendous growth in cloud offerings. This isn't any different with AirWatch and as with many other organizations, AirWatch provides the option of using the cloud to host your EMM suite, also known as their Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.

There are a lot of questions regarding migration to cloud environments with security and data privacy and the concerns with the possibility of technical positions being eliminated. For the security concerns, hosting companies are providing the encryption and controls to meet organizations security requirements. For the most part, I'd imagine enterprise-grade cloud services are providing more than what you are able to provide on-premise, including the latest hardware and software with both physical and software security in place along with high availability and disaster recovery. With an AirWatch SaaS deployment, you are only storing the device information in the cloud environment and there is no corporate data being stored in the cloud, thus providing less risk with using that environment.

For the technical personnel concerns, there will be a change, but it doesn't necessarily mean positions being eliminated. Traditionally as technicians, we tend to spend most of our time dealing with installations, upgrades, patches, and failures of the services (both hardware and software). Because of this, our positions have become more of an operational role, taking the focus away from the service being provided and being able to improve on these services for the customers. Now that we are able to offload the heavy burden of our everyday jobs, we can focus more on the solutions/integrations with the product, allowing us the ability to provide a more service-oriented workforce and better user experience. Also, the mobile space is currently an extremely fast-growing area and won't slow down anytime soon. Because of this, eliminating as much management as possible by moving to a cloud environment will also allow us to focus on the end user service and experience, which is what really matters.

By moving to a cloud environment, we are seeing a shift in the structure of teams. Cloud, service, innovative, architecture are some of the names that are starting to appear in team names as we are seeing a shift in the way, as we have traditionally seen Information Technology (IT) move to more of an Information Service (IS) era.

The following is a breakdown of the hosting options provided by AirWatch:

Now that you have all the information on the Management suite and Hosting options, you can make a decision on what best fits your organization. The licensing cost is dependent on which suite you select and the hosting plan you move forward with. The Cloud offering is subscription based per device annually or subscription based per user (up to three devices) annually. The cost includes the standard hosting. The on-premise solution has an initial per device cost with a perpetual annual maintenance fee at a smaller cost of the initial fee.